Macbeth Analyzing Literature-Complete Guide

Reading – Macbeth analyzing literature

• William Shakespeare is noted to be the greatest playwright and poet that has ever lived.
• Shakespeare wrote 154 sonnets, many poems, and 37 plays grouped into comedies, histories, and tragedies.
• Shakespeare understood human nature and created characters portraying human tragedy and comedy.
• Shakespeare’s Macbeth is one of the most critically acclaimed tragedies.
• Macbeth is the hindmost of all Shakespeare’s tragedies, the others being Othello, King Lear, and Hamlet.
• It is a proportionately short play without a major subplot. Nevertheless, it is considered by many more scholars to be Shakespeare’s darkest work, as he adds a supernatural dimension that purposively conspires against Macbeth and his kingdom.
• The tragedy is about Macbeth’s bloody rise to power, including the murder of the Scottish king, Duncan, and the guilt-ridden pathology of evil deeds generating still more evil deeds.
• Macbeth is the most complex one that Shakespeare has ever portrayed. It is complicated because Macbeth’s motives cannot be analyzed and labeled.
• Macbeth is one of the most perfect and complex heroes of Shakespeare.
• This tragedy presents a prominent figure—the tragic hero—who comes to ruin because of an error in judgment or a weakness in character—a tragic flaw.
• One or more antagonists, or opposing characters, also work against the tragic hero, and the action builds to a catastrophe, a disastrous end involving deaths.